


we gon' burn the whole house down

by wanderNavi



Category: One Piece
Genre: Gen, why on earth am i writing about one piece again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-02
Updated: 2019-02-02
Packaged: 2019-10-21 05:19:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17636687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderNavi/pseuds/wanderNavi
Summary: “Of course, I’m angry!” Shun yells at his poor helper that doesn’t deserve to be subjected to this, “A whole library burned down. Do you know how often libraries burn down? Too often!”





	we gon' burn the whole house down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AceofCoins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceofCoins/gifts).



> It’s been literal years since I’ve written for or read One Piece; one of the last things I remember is howling with laughter over bread and hat hair. From what I’ve tangentially glimpsed in the meanwhile: Law acquired a One Piece approved appropriately tragic backstory that maybe includes anime’s typical secret sibling name swapping bullshit, Nami maybe accidentally acquired a moment of awesome, Sabo acquired a resurrection, and Sanji acquired backstory Part 2 with a helping of hand and wedding related trauma and a full name that still leaves me mildly betrayed every time I think about it. There are also now even more canon furries and Jimbie might have wrecked Straw Hat Crew tumblr gifsets.
> 
> It’s been a while.
> 
> I’m not particularly interested in catching up, so the next couple hundred words are probably all completely wrong from the outset. 
> 
> Thanks Victor.
> 
> Title from AJR's "Burn the House Down"

“It’s only one of the greatest libraries ever seen on the planet,” Shun says, “and while the climate control systems must have been hell, thanks to also literally being a giant tree, that much knowledge and history is priceless.”

His commander flips another sheet of paper over. “From the reports we’ve found, a decent percentage of those books are in lakes now. That or burned to ashes. Add on weather degradation and I wonder how much even you can recover.”

“That doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything to be recovered.”

The man finally sets down his novel and leans back in the wooden chair that Shun knows for a fact kill all sensation in your ass within an hour. How a man this bullheaded survived to this point in life and had the luck of being his boss, Shun will never know nor wants to ever know.

“There’s covertly undermining the World Government, and then there’s slapping a target on a boat for every Marine to shoot at while you simultaneously give them the two-finger salute. No.”

Shun steals the words from his book and stalks out of the cramped office. He also leaves ink splattered all over the door in retaliation and a heavy sigh follows him out.

* * *

The captain of this ship’s skeleton crew makes another unhappy face at Shun’s crates and crates of empty books. Promise this woman she’s smuggling guns or illicit goods and she’s as happy as a clam. Put several tons of paper in her hold and she starts giving Shun looks like he slaughtered a litter of puppies and kittens in front of her family. Shun thinks he has a decent tolerance for crazy people, what with his childhood, but there are always new individuals willing to prove him wrong.

“Please stop doing that,” he says, completely disturbed by how the captain’s mouth tries to escape her face with the weight of her frown, “I can spontaneously generate ink. I can’t spontaneously generate paper.”

“But do you really need so much? I could be making bigger bucks with rare spices right now. Instead my hold’s been taken over with a bookstore.”

“If anything, these might not be enough.”

He takes a long sip from his empty tea cup, so he doesn’t have to keep engaging with this conversation. Every evening, he already has to deal with the commander’s nagging. He’s not going to deal with this in person too.

Her expression shifts to horrified in the meanwhile. “ _More?_ ”

Oh, please. “If this is really so egregious, I’m sure we can find someone else to play transport for my team.”

“Do that,” she says even while both of them know the Revolutionary Army doesn’t have infinite resources to saddle someone else with Shun. “You do that.”

* * *

The Marines had enough courtesy to not break into his dorm room when they set about trying to arrest him back in college. In part, this may have been thanks to the quite public knowledge that Shun barely spent any time in said dorm room. He might have spent more time at night in the library and various lecture halls than actually in that room. The only guaranteed time he spent there was to check every week that none of the food in the fridge went bad.

So, instead, Shun’s poor dissertation professor gets roughed up by armed men trying to locate their wayward student with anti-authoritarian leanings. All parties involved were probably sorely disappointed by the lack of information, given that the professor had no idea that Shun was spending his time breaking into illegal classes and classified archives for a pet project.

Regardless, Shun bails the moment the student grapevine sends him the alert. He knows he’s learned too much considering the rampant trails of murders, show trials, and exterminations he’s unearthed just from Sabaody’s local Marine chapters. Like. His childhood playgrounds were a block away from slave auctions. He’s _known_ the state of now, but then he just had to start digging into the highly contradictory history of the government’s founding.

Arrest warrants. Being on the run. He uses his logia abilities to mess with some of his features, dunking colored ink through his hair over and over again. There are too many close calls, especially when the Marines start pulling out the seastone bullets and he can’t just dissolve out of the way.

Sometimes Shun thinks it’s a miracle he found the Revolutionary Army in time. Or that they found him. Semantics.

* * *

Ohara is a burned husk.

Shun’s assistant elbows him while they’re pulling into the degraded remains of its port and points at shipwrecks jutting out of the low tide. Hulls blown open by cannonballs and explosions choke with seaweed and he turns away before he can look for skeletons.

Years out in the salt breeze and under rainfall have corroded and rotted the burned-out trunks. A few young saplings growing out the dirty ash stretch their tentative branches into the steel gray sky.

Something crunches under his boots and Shun doesn’t fucking look.

Even in the rotting aftermath of the inferno that swept through this island, the old tree’s corpse casts long shadows with it bulk. They go there first.

Miracles of miracles, there are some books in the wreckage after a few days spent clearing out the ruins. The musky smell of old wood is embedded down to his bones now, and his hair is never going to get the smell of old smoke out, but there are actual books in the luckiest crevices.

Tugging off a glove he carefully runs a finger over the crumbling ink, coaxing it into liquidity, trying, please, _please_ , anything, something to make the text lift off the few pages that survive. The words shiver and slowly peel off into his control. Shun barely breaths, even with the glass barrier in the way as protection, _please let this work_.

He rubs the ashy grit into a blank journal laid out and almost cries when the transfer succeeds. Shaking hands brush on the sealant to protect the delicate words. Splashes of ink trail down his neck and he rests his head on the glass. Slumps there for a few moments, sinking into his whirlwind thoughts.

Several thousand years work, wiped out in an afternoon.

Shun tucks his hands into his sides and shakes with the rage.

* * *

“Of course, I’m angry!” Shun yells at his poor helper that doesn’t deserve to be subjected to this, “A whole library burned down. Do you know how often libraries burn down? _Too often!_ ”

The den den does a decent approximation of the Commander’s drawn and mulish face that evening when he tells him, “Shun, there’s only so many times you can get written up in a week.”

“Let’s be real,” Shun says because forty percent of his life blood is coffee and another forty-five percent is pure orneriness, “None of us are in a revolution because we truly believe in bureaucracy or authority.”

They spend the rest of week crawling through the library’s resting place, collecting every scrap they can. Titling each section is mostly guesswork and in evenings when Shun flicks through the pages they’ve collected, he has no idea what each snippet talks about. Archiving this and cataloging all this is going to be a nightmare.

Finally, its time for them to pack up camp and move to the lake. And, well.

Shun panics when he sees just how _large_ the lake is. “We’ll need some kind of … basket system. These cliff sides are too steep and tall for us to climb and well. Oh, please let this be freshwater.”

“I think it is, Mr. Oshiro,” his assistant says from their crouch. “How deep do you think it is though?”

“Even if its not extremely deep, it’s still so wide, we …” The wind rakes through their hair and shakes their jackets. The air is silent save for the distant crash of waves. Thoughts spin through Shun’s mind: They can call on the ship crew for help, in tonight report, he’s going to request far more time for this project, he definitely didn’t bring enough books for this, even at his fastest, this is going to take too long, but hopefully some of the newer archives were in waterproof ink, lugging all these volumes up is going to be _heavy_ –

“They must have thrown the books out during the attack.” Shun swallows against the heavy lump crawling up to his jaw. “Those bodies we found, everything was burning, how long did they keep tossing the books out, they must have –”

His jaw sticks and he starts to lose control over his form in a way he hasn’t since a child. “ _Gods_.”

* * *

When Shun was at the tender age of brat, he was cognitively sound enough to recognize a devil fruit for the cursed rarity it is, yet still, in a fit of insanity disguised as curiosity, take out a knife to pop the eldritch swirl of a stone from the center of the fake peach, cut the peach into nose-curling slices, and gag while stuffing his face and forcing it all down thanks to an ingrained greater distaste for wasting even the shittiest food. He’s uncertain at the exact age, but the stupidity points at simply _brat_.

He spends the rest of the day feeling miserably sick from the taste that refuses to wash out, so he heads to bed early. The next morning, he wakes up to sheets stained with black ink. No amount of scrubbing washes it out and he soon loses interest in the task anyways.

In the following days, it doesn’t take long for Shun to figure out his new power over ink, nor for the people he accidentally stole from to try tracking him down. The traders, pirates, on Sabaody there’s little distinction or care for distinction, find him experimenting in an empty lot, flinging ink against a tree. There’s shouting and knives and Shun learns the distinctly unpleasant experience of running through another human when he sprints through the grabbing and waving arms, sections of his body dissolving into ink and flowing unheeding.

There’s a fishman he sees every now and then and Shun always chases him down, yapping for lessons in how to fight with liquids. These pleas never went anywhere, but his time was infinite and the only other thing taking up Shun’s time was reading books while waiting for adults to return to his quiet home.

He never tells his parents about the time he beat up a pack of other children playing at slave traders. Or about the time he breaks into the headquarters of actual slave traders. Or all the time he spends at the pirate hangouts, causing trouble.

For everyone’s sanity, it was better that way.

* * *

They start running out of space for all the books they dredge up out of the lake. Shun doesn’t pay much attention to where the others end up storing the volumes. He’s too busy yanking out the ink and transferring the text into the stacks of notebooks surround him. Once the pages dry out, this whole process gets far more troublesome.

No one says anything when he shucks off his shirt so the ink can flow easier from one hand to the other without staining everywhere. Miroku and he operate in silence, with only the scratching of their pen or the clacking of their typewriter as they record as much as they can on the properties of the books – the leather, the parchment, the colors, all the components that Shun can’t save.

Days pass, and they fight past the exhaustion. There’s no telling when Marines or wayward sea travelers might stumble across their activity.

One morning, with dawn breaking and the sea gulls screaming, they check out the tree once more. This time, they find the basement and with sober minds take in the giant carved block of stone.

“Got a notebook?” Shun whispers as the sun’s rays pierce through the dust-filled air.

“Yes.”

The rest of the morning is spent recording everything they can about what served the island its death sentence.

* * *

In school before college once, a classmate stared at Shun for a few minutes unblinking and when he finally questioned her if there was something on his face, she simply said, “You’re a dumbass, but pretty smart.”

He spent the rest of the day in a confused haze.

The sentence comes back to haunt him when Shun finally tires of all the agitprop in college and start seeking out … other sides of the stories. Plenty of books and political philosophy and waffling float around on the black markets. And its not even like the World Government even tries keeping historical consistency.

Shun goes digging, consuming everything he can like the starving.

Then he makes the mistake of writing his thoughts himself.

* * *

“There are Marines on the way.”

Shun sighs. “About time, honestly. Thankfully, we’ve filled most of the books I brought. How long do we have?”

“A few days at least. Maybe two weeks if you’re lucky.”

Good. “That’s enough time for us break camp and maybe do a few more transfers. Are the archives at headquarters ready for us?”

The den den smiles and Shun almost flinches. Shun swears the commander only has five distinct expressions, and smiling is not on that list. “They eagerly await your safe return.”

Well. He quickly ends the call so he can freak out over the smiling business in private.

They visit the graves they dug one last time to pay a final set of respects. The lake is still filled with layers of books but Shun doesn’t think he’ll be able to come back here any time soon. Not with the Marines now aware of their activities.

“It’s not the same,” he says to the wooden crosses they fashioned. “And it’s far from complete. But we won’t let this knowledge die out. We won’t let the government wipe out your history too.”

Shun doesn’t look back when the ship pulls out.


End file.
